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LINCOLN — As they followed the story about the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's ouster from a prestigious group of research universities, some sideline observers spotted what they believe is a troubling Texas connection.
Two former presidents of the University of Texas now are top officials at the Association of American Universities. Texas, meanwhile, has been Nebraska's chief nemesis in Big 12 athletic conference politics, with Texas calling the shots on everything from academic requirements for athletes to the way revenues were distributed.
AAU leaders and others in the know say they caught no whiff that Texas was trying to punish Nebraska for leaving the Big 12.
“In all of this, throughout this entire event, that's the silliest idea I ever heard,” said AAU spokesman Barry Toiv.
UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman said that while the AAU connections with the University of Texas are “intriguing,” they do not explain the decision.
“I'm not much of a conspiracy buff,” Perlman said. “There was a conspiracy here, but it didn't have anything to do with Texas.”
But that is unlikely to satisfy the skeptics.
In emails and phone calls to the newspaper, some readers speculated that UNL got kicked out of the AAU in retaliation for leaving the Big 12 for the Big Ten conference.
“UNL has been sucker punched by Texas again,” said one email. “It's so obvious, it's sickening,” said a caller.
Even some faculty members were suspicious, wondering whether UNL leaders did a little too much bragging about the university's AAU status as it headed into the Big Ten.
In interviews last week, some leaders at Big Ten and Big 12 universities expressed concern about the criteria used to oust UNL from the group. But they also said sports played no role in the vote against UNL.
“This is nothing to do with athletics or athletics conferences,” said University of Kansas Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little. “The Big 12 and the Big Ten are athletic conferences. The decision and voting in the AAU is not related to which conference you belong to.”
A membership review committee recommended ousting UNL after concluding it did not score high enough on the group's criteria, which compared competitive research funding and faculty awards to the total number of tenured faculty.
The full organization voted to end UNL's membership despite Perlman's argument that the criteria do not give adequate credit to the university's research and academic record.
Perlman maintains the “conspiracy” was that some members wanted to make the AAU smaller and more elite.
“It was out of a belief of elite schools that they were going to make the AAU smaller, and it didn't matter what they did to get there,” he said.
AAU President Robert Berdahl served as University of Texas president from 1993 to 1997, and then chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1997 to 2004. Larry R. Faulkner, chairman of the AAU committee that recommended the UNL ouster, was president there from 1998 to 2006. Faulkner and Berdahl both declined to be interviewed.
Perlman said the current University of Texas president, William Powers Jr., knew nothing about the plan to boot Nebraska before receiving a ballot and related materials under his hotel room door on Sunday, April 10, in advance of an AAU presidents meeting in Washington, D.C.
Powers did not respond to a request for an interview last week.
Though he does not know how they finally voted, Perlman said, the leaders of all six Big 12 AAU members spoke in favor of UNL's continued membership, either to him personally or during an April 11 meeting leading up to the vote. So did 10 of the 11 other Big Ten members. Perlman declined to say who remained silent.
By a 44-19 vote, UNL became the first university to be voted out in the organization's 111-year history. Just two votes would have changed the outcome, because more than a two-thirds' majority, or 43 votes, was required for elimination.
Phone calls by a World-Herald reporter to Big 12 and Big Ten AAU members did not reveal how they voted. Only a couple of the 17 presidents and chancellors contacted agreed to be interviewed.
Penn State President Graham Spanier, a former UNL chancellor, described the outcome of the AAU vote as “unfortunate.”
“I am incredibly impressed with what's happened at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln over the past decade,” he said. “I regret very much this recent outcome with the AAU.”
He said he saw no evidence that athletic conference affiliation factored in the vote.
“It was never mentioned in the discussion or the debate,” he said.
Bronson Hilliard, a spokesman for University of Colorado Chancellor Phil DiStefano, said that although UNL and Colorado have “been old friends and rivals on the football field,” athletics played no role in the decision to eliminate UNL from the AAU.
“It's based purely on the academic portfolio, the quality of the research, its faculty, its graduate students and its graduate programs,”Hilliard said.
Colorado also is leaving the Big 12, to join the Pac-12 conference. Hilliard said DiStefano, like other presidents and chancellors, would not talk about his vote because it would violate AAU protocol.
Kansas' Gray-Little, however, said she's concerned that AAU criteria do not accurately measure a university's quality — and whether the AAU itself is now heading in the wrong direction.
The criteria may not give enough weight to agricultural research, she said, and may handicap universities, such as UNL, that don't have a research-heavy medical center on campus.
“This is an event that's not only disappointing to the people of Nebraska, it's more generally controversial,” she said.
“I expect there will be more conversation about when this should be done, how this should be done and if it should be done.”
Contact the writer:
402-473-9581, leslie.reed@owh.com
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